paralysis/movement (or: what weeding can and cannot do)

A couple of years ago, when I was in India, watching the Superbowl in the middle of the night, I got a phone call from my mother, who told me that our dog had been hit by a car.  The first thing you should know about this story is: he lived, don’t worry, he’s mostly okay now.  The second thing that you should know is: in my family, we are really, really stupid about our pets.

We caught the next flight back to the States.  The dog had been ours, living with my parents while we both worked abroad that year.  We sometimes wish for death to end the suffering of the humans we love; but we generally agonize when that decision is actually ours to make, as it is in the case of a pet.

We found the dog lying on the floor, partially covered by a blanket.  We had come to say goodbye, all four or five of us.  To get us out of the way, a technician moved him to a crate in the corner, and we crawled inside, trying to get him to eat something.  “Perhaps some dog food,” she suggested.  “He actually prefers vegetables,” I told her.  I could see her thinking, Great, there is a family of crazy people crammed into a cage in the middle of the ICU, trying to get their dog to eat sweet potatoes.  He seemed to want to live.  We didn’t make a decision, but we didn’t not make a decision.  After a few days, they moved him to a rehabilitation center.  The staff would bring him out, lay him on his side on a blanket, and he would look at us solemnly out of the corner of his eye while we took turns moving his hind legs in a running motion, so that the muscles wouldn’t atrophy.  I remember my father in particular, sitting patiently on the floor, gently moving the dog’s left leg.

returned to India, but we decided that I would stay for a week or two and decide what to do.  A week or so later, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop when my father left for a routine follow-up with his doctor.  I remember that my mother, for no apparent reason, said, “Wait, I’ll go with you.”  I was still there, typing, when they returned an hour or two later, their faces unsteady and strange.

It was obvious that they had greater problems than a partially-paralyzed dog.  It was also clear to me that I wasn’t going to be living in India for the next six months. 

The dog came home, spent the days and nights crying as he tried to drag himself around by his front legs.  We kept moving his hind legs like he was running running running.

Ostensibly, I’d come home to help, but there wasn’t much I could actually do: my father’s health was in the hands of his doctors, and the dog’s prognosis was a complete unknown, even to the vets. 

So I dug.  In the late afternoon, around five or five-thirty, most days, I would go out in the backyard and dig until dark.  I weeded on my hands and knees until my fingernails were permanently black and broken and my hamstrings tight.  Then I set my sights in the far back of their yard, where there was nothing but a nasty Norway maple, a rounded holly, some old azaleas, and a Japanese snowbell.  As I said recently to a family friend, I hate cutting down trees, and always suspect that I am inducing some sort of karmic debt for doing so; but if I hadn’t been five years old when we moved to this house, I would have insisted that we cut down that maple and plant something else in its place.  The roots of the Norway maple are shallow and selfish, while the tree itself is relatively unspectacular.  The holly was enormous, half-moon shaped: when I was a child, it had provided a convenient space to hide during many different iterations of tag.  While the holly, azaleas and snowbell had probably been planted at the same time as the maple, and hence had had a chance to establish themselves, everything we had ever planted since had died.  My plan was to create a woodland shade garden.  My mother's friend no longer wanted her camellia, so I dug it up, threw in the trunk, and hauled it up the hill in a wheelbarrow.  The tire soon went flat as I dragged up two more snowbells, another camellia, five lime-green euphorbia, three rhododendrons, innumerable bags of dirt and mulch.  I chopped up hostas and ferns and replanted them, laid down a drip-line hose.  I found a pile of bricks from a terrace my parents had torn up years earlier, and laid them down in an ersatz path to a sloppy terrace, where I placed two deck chairs.  I attacked the ivy that was growing under the fence from a neighbor’s yard, and got on my belly to wrestle with the porcelain vine strangling the white azalea that blooms on Mother’s Day. 

The dog began to hop, then to walk, his hind legs sagging, wobbly.  My father met with doctors to determine possible courses of treatment.  At night he worried.  He wanted a plan to follow.

Day after day, from March on, I worked in that garden, weeding and planting and mulching and deadheading and pruning.  It rained heavily that spring, and by late May the garden was lush.  Never before or since has it look that good. 

After my father’s surgery, I moved back to New York, while he spent a month at home convalescing.  When I would come to visit, in the heat of the summer, the house would be empty.  But if I looked out the kitchen window, I could just see, in the far back of the yard, beyond the rounded border of hosta and sedum, past the old white azalea, surrounded by the new rhododendrons, my father in a chair and the dog at his feet.  In the heat of the day, my father would tell me, wondrously, it felt twenty degrees cooler back there in the shade.  They would stay out there so long, until dusk, past dusk, just sitting, that I began to wonder how they weren’t eaten alive by mosquitoes, I began to worry that they’d never come back in.